One of the rea­sons I am as pro­lif­ic as I am, which real­ly isn’t to say I’m pro­lif­ic what­so­ev­er, but to say that I tru­ly do write, is because my lit­tle son takes long naps dur­ing which I force myself to write. I can’t do house­work. Not only do I detest doing dish­es and get no enjoy­ment in scour­ing ovens whatsoever�but do like a clean house I must clarify�I can’t clean, because he might wake, so I write. My work must be at least tan­gen­tial­ly con­nect­ed to writ­ing for it to be con­sid­ered work. Oth­er­wise, what I am doing is wast­ing time.

The cliche “you can’t please every­one” becomes some­thing more com­plex when the “every­one” expands to include the forces with­in both the world and us. If indeed sat­is­fy­ing those wills that require sat­is­fac­tion is impos­si­ble, then how does one act in such a world? Such a world forces upon us the need to choose which wills will be sat­is­fied at the same time it denies us the abil­i­ty to know if our actions will cer­tain­ly ful­fill the cho­sen will(s). Thus, we act uncer­tain of whom we must sat­is­fy and what spe­cif­ic actions are required to obtain that sat­is­fac­tion. Even more frus­trat­ing is the pos­si­bil­i­ty that the action that sat­is­fies one force will simul­ta­ne­ous­ly enrage anoth­er.

This entry is a fol­low-up to Thursday’s kind of abstract dis­cus­sion about using Hegel’s ideas of tragedy in the writ­ing of (short) short fic­tion. I thought maybe an exam­ple in which I talk about how I used these ideas in a par­tic­u­lar sto­ry might be help­ful.

For Friday’s Writ­ing Prompt, try to find a way to give read­ers access to your mind and/or think­ing, and have that ele­ment of the piece (this glimpse into the mind of the piece’s cre­ator) be an essen­tial part of the piece’s work­ings.

Play these songs when writ­ing has got you down, and you’ll be up and writ­ing in no time. Be sure to sug­gest a tenth song for the list in the com­ments. Enjoy. K’naan, “Wav­ing Flag” Kooks, “Ooh La” Her­cules & Love Affair, “Blind” Mach­ester Orches­tra, “The Only One” Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, “The […]

In short, the short short engages in its own trag­ic bat­tle against the restric­tions of form–of the require­ments that demand clo­sure, of the reader’s need for cer­tain­ty and mean­ing. In the mod­ernist world of Freud, one probed beneath the sur­face cer­tain to find some sub­merged, deep­er mean­ing; in the post­mod­ern world, such a jour­ney leads one to the real­iza­tion that the world no longer has the pow­er to pro­vide such cer­tain­ty and answers–and all we can do is fig­ure out the right ques­tions to ask.

The issue of mis­un­der­stand­ing and then try­ing to make sense of what is mis­un­der­stood may well be the dom­i­nant theme of mod­ern lit­er­ary fic­tion. Lucky us, to live in such an age, to take for grant­ed the good for­tune of hav­ing our needs so amply pro­vid­ed. Free from the drea­ry and exhaust­ing and often icky tasks nec­es­sary for sur­vival, released from wor­ries of crop-swarm­ing locusts and man-eat­ing bears, our bel­lies sat­ed and then some, we turn our atten­tion inward.

The ques­tion too often asked of flash fic­tion is “Can you deliv­er a sto­ry in so few words” It’s an okay ques­tion, if that’s what you want to do with flash fiction�deliver sto­ries. As the word count lessens and the space con­stricts, the ques­tion seems to remain con­stant (for some). Even when it gets Twit­ter­sized, peo­ple focus on the chal­lenge of deliv­er­ing a sto­ry with so few words. Per­son­al­ly, as either a writer or read­er, I don’t par­tic­u­lar­ly want 140-char­ac­ter sto­ries. I want some­thing else, some­thing unique­ly suit­ed for 140-char­ac­ters, some­thing the world (per­haps) has yet to see.

I came across, a num­ber of years ago, Joanne Avallon’s “All This” in Micro Fic­tion: An Anthol­o­gy of Real­ly Short Sto­ries, and recent­ly found her on Face­book, intro­duc­ing myself, I think, with “Are you the Joanne Aval­lon who wrote that amaz­ing sto­ry in that micro fic­tion anthol­o­gy?” She was the Joanne Aval­lon. Today, Joanne talks about the story’s mean­ing to her as a writer and I talk about about the sto­ry from my per­spec­tive as its read­er. But first, the ever-amaz­ing “All This.”

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